Sar-ek stood breathing heavily over the lifeless form of the would-be assassin—another threat quashed, another kill in a war gone far beyond reason. The decapitated body of the freak lay splayed on the craggy ground. Blood seeped into the ash at his feet, mixing with his own as it dripped from his ruined armour.

  Above him, the sky glistened with starlight. At the same time, across the breadth of the surface, the serpentine horror of Blachaeus Tem Etal lunged. Far off, Sar-ek saw monstrous coils flatten whole squads in a single sweep. The beast’s unstoppable hunger churned through the ranks, pushing toward the flash of desperate lancefire and half-muffled roars. The distance lent it a strange ambience—no longer the crushing reverberations of the City’s corridors but an open, windswept quiet that made even the savage battle feel ethereal.

  He flexed his shoulders, wincing as the dented cuirass shifted against bruised ribs. The memory of Blachaeus’ jaws crushing him shook his bones, and his battered pauldron squealed in protest as he tugged it into a more comfortable position. Far across the battlefield, a chain of thunderous detonations lit up the horizon. Fire and smoke fountained into the night sky, but all that reached Sar-ek was a distant rumble—like a storm on the other side of the world. They had deployed a missile launcher. The explosions did nothing. The serpent endured, snarling as it reared up over the rubble and haze.

  Something rustled behind him. He turned halfway, not quite meeting her eyes, and saw Bee. She stood—trembling, wheezing, struggling to stay on her feet, her skin still rippling with the presence of those vile parasites. But she was upright, alive. She’d come out here in the open and seen him dispatch her would-be assassin.

  “Thank you,” she said, voice hoarse. A simple acknowledgement.

  Sar-ek grunted, exhaling through his nose in something like contempt and relief.

  “That’s the job, little Goddess,” he said, the words rough. Then, with a shrug of his dented pauldron, he murmured the old epithet in a near whisper: “One more step towards Paradise.”

  Without another word, he shouldered his heavy sword and stepped away, stride limping, the battered metal of his greaves rattling with every motion. He advanced toward the distant carnage, smoke and fire silhouetting his figure, uncertain whether he walked to his own demise.

  Meanwhile, Jhedothar stood on a jagged outcrop of calcified bone, the ashen air biting at his nostrils as he surveyed the battlefield below. The serpent raged, that vile abomination pulsing and lunging in thick coils, snatching up freaks and thrashing them into the dust. Jhedothar’s grip tightened on the long haft of his ruby spear, the polished red blade embedded at its tip shimmering with an almost hungry vibration. This was his warband, his soldiers, his blood being shed.

  Below him, further down the ridge, Lady Hash and her retinue waited with measured calm. Their azure-and-sable banners hung in the breeze, uncertain whether to commit or withdraw. Even at this distance, Jhedothar could sense her indecision—she would only act if the balance tipped toward her advantage. One misstep and she might retreat, leaving the butchery to unfold alone.

  His jaw clenched. So far, that monstrous serpent had devastated the forces of both Lady Hash and Lady Bhaeryn, though the black-and-gold loyal to him bore the brunt. In the distance, one of the colossal Nesta Barshaum trudged across the battlefield, its metal supports creaking in protest as it pivoted the City-breaking cannon. Gears groaned with the effort of swinging the ancient weapon’s barrel around, but it was not yet trained on the thrashing horror.

  Then his attention snapped to dash of motion at a battered supply crawler below. Cartaxa—one of the pale loyal to the Eidolon, a Knight Consort in battered gear—yanked a missile tube from the side of the biocrawler and hoisted it onto his shoulder with a quiet sense of resolve. From Jhedothar’s vantage, he saw him steady his stance, then fire.

  A trail of smokey exhaust streaked through the night. The missile struck the serpent’s hide with a shriek of metal and gore, exploding in a brilliant flash of flesh-speckled flame. For an instant, the abomination reared, shrieking in its legion of chorused voices. Flesh parted, a gaping cavity sputtering black fluid.

  But the horror was only momentarily stunned. Even as Jhedothar watched, the mass of stolen bodies surged and slid across the fresh wound, knitting it shut in seconds. The serpent hammered the ground, roaring anew.

  Jhedothar shifted his gaze to the vine-laden figure of Toshtta Yew, who cut a bold silhouette even in the swirling haze of dust and ash. Her voice—bold—carried over the battle’s roar as she waved a sword in one hand and a lance in the other. At her command, a gathered line of dark-armoured soldiery raised their lances, unleashing a sudden volley of crackling fire along the serpent’s far flank. Through the drifting smoke, Jhedothar saw Cartaxa’s missile barrage and Toshtta’s volley combine into a searing, crossfire assault. The behemoth reeled, monstrous sinews and twisted grafts flinching in momentary pain.

  Silence gripped the battlefield for just a heartbeat, thick as the pungent tang of blood on the wind. The serpent’s gargantuan coils slithered in indecision, half-lurching from the smoking wounds. Jhedothar thought they might have bought the precious seconds needed for the Nesta Barshaum to load and fire.

  Yet such a time could never last.

  A horrific shriek shattered the field as the serpent’s head, snarling and crowned by the cybernetic jaws rendered of the fallen Eidolon, snapped downward. Its bulk swept across the ground, devouring the front rank of Toshtta’s line in one unstoppable surge. The churn of its pulsing flesh claimed shrieking bodies, merging them into the roiling abomination.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Then, for one gut-twisting moment, Jhedothar saw her—Toshtta, the proud Thorn of the Rose, thrashing in the serpent’s opened maw. Her lacquered armour bent shattered, and tore in the creature’s crushing bite. Its cruel jaws dropped half of her butchered form to the ash, trailing roots and gore in a red arc. The other half vanished in the beast’s all-devouring mass.

  Jhedothar’s breath caught, revulsion gripping him. His knuckles whitened around his ruby spear as the battered defenders reeled back in horror.

  The afterimage of Toshtta Yew’s ruined body still burned against the back of his eyelids. He twisted away from the horror, forcing his legs to move, stumbling on half-melted plates of ground that made the ravaged earth beneath him creak and shift like worn cartilage. Numb, he blinked dryness from his eyes and looked up at the Nesta Barshaum. Its hull, pitted and groaning, had at last managed to lever its cannon towards the serpent.

  He hardly had time to register the monstrous shape hissing and lurching across the battlefield in response before that muzzle flash tore the darkness apart. A moment stretched, unreal, lit by blistering brilliance. Jhedothar felt his teeth grind in his jaw as every bone in his body rattled in protest. Then the cannon’s eruption of white-hot fury drowned out all else. Dust screamed up in a long spiral, gritty shards of blasted debris spinning in a blizzard of ash and ground-up stone. Jhedothar was flung sideways; he barely managed to catch himself with his tall centaurian stride, his tread stumbling on the sinew of collapsed fortifications, which felt too much like living skin under his footfalls.

  The raw force slammed through ranks of the armed forces, freaks and pale alike knocked to the ground as though battered by the hand of some wrathful Goddess—or by her violent promise, at least. For an instant, Jhedothar’s ears refused to do more than ring, high and piercing, as though someone had driven a spike of steely bone behind his eyes. He coughed, tasting old iron and dirt, his mouth filled with the cinder of sundered flesh. When his vision swam back into focus, he turned himself only to see the very air before him fuming with scorching dust that slipped across the night sky in ribbons of grey.

  In the centre of that churned wasteland writhed the serpent—profane, near-carved in two by the Barshaum’s over-penetrating projectile. Its midsection was flensed to torn ligaments and splintered carapace, but what made Jhedothar’s blood run cold were the hundreds of subsumed bodies inside that thing, tangling in half-digested unison. Limbs, mouths, and swollen torsos worked in concert, vile pieces reassembling themselves to lock their serpent host together again. A chorus of wailing moans and slick, sucking noises made Jhedothar’s stomach lurch.

  He staggered forward, feeling the tremor of fresh artillery repositioning. Even though the primal part of him screamed to flee, his trained instinct as an erstwhile Knights Tyrant snapped back into the forefront of his mind: to go forth and strike the killing blow.

  But the serpent would not yield so easily. Its exposed ribs—if they could be called ribs—flexed inside the gaping wound, snapping like jaws, pulling in the broken limbs of its hapless devoured. Sludge-like blood slithered through the shards of its flesh, drawn to patch its body in a macabre tapestry.

  Jhedothar swallowed bile, blinking through the drifting cinders as the serpent coiled anew, refusing to die. Here and there, along its sundered hide, clotted lumps of muscle tightened in a desperate attempt to pull the two halves together. Above, the Nesta Barshaum’s barrel smoked, the reek of burning composites and flash charge mingling with the sour tang of blood-soaked dust.

  The very foundations of Acetyn—its bones, its mutated silicon flesh, and its suffering inhabitants—felt as though they were unravelling at that moment.

  Jhedothar drew a ragged breath, seeing the serpent’s jagged silhouette dance across the smouldering battlefield. One heartbeat earlier, it had writhed in broken ruin—now, in the time it took for the Nesta Barshaum’s crews to prepare a second shot, the beast stood hale and ravenous once more.

  He felt a wrench of disbelief as torn ligaments, shredded plate, and pulped organs slithered back into place. Its impossible flesh knitted itself with throbbing haste, the profane bodies within slithering against one another, bones and sinew re-tangling in obscene union. A single instant of starlight caught the glimmer of slick, half-formed eyes along its flank—belonging to devoured creatures, now an indiscriminate mass, all hungry.

  Jhedothar’s legs braced, realising their gun crews were far too slow. Across the rumbling plain, he spotted a flash of movement: the many-legged form of Slashex slipping out from the Nesta Barshaum’s rent cabin, crawling over the edges with a lurch of his mismatched limbs. Cybernetic rods and thick cables jutted from Slashex’s spine; he carried a fleeting moment of fear on his blind face before diving behind the ridge of a sunken rock outcropping.

  And the serpent lunged.

  The Nesta Barshaum’s muzzle, by some wretched twist of luck or fate, was caught mid-reload with no chance to deter the serpent’s strike.

  With a scream like fractured metal, it ploughed into the cannon’s battery, ripping the plating away like wet parchment. In seconds, shards of composite and bone plating were hurled skyward. Jhedothar’s throat constricted as he saw an entire half of the massive artillery rig twist under the serpent’s thrashing coils. Gears shrieked, and anchors tore free. Crewmembers who had been valiantly trying to reload were flung against the twisted scaffolding or pinned by sinewy loops of the serpent’s body.

  Then came the tearing.

  Steel beams deformed with horrid squeals, and throbbing cables—some for hydraulic lines, others for living muscle—split open. The Nesta Barshaum’s heart, an ancient relic that had roared like a thunderclap just moments earlier, collapsed into an unrecognisable mound of slag and ruin.

  Jhedothar tasted acid at the back of his throat, powerless to halt the calamity. Stung by grit and ash, he could scarcely see the battered silhouette of their entire army, those that still lived sprawled across the field. The mighty cannon’s backlash had scoured half of them to the ground, while the serpent’s unnatural resilience broke what was left of their hopes. He saw one pale cradle his snapped blade-limb, another freak dig itself from the grit and rubble. Someone—maybe a freak soldier or a battered pale—staggered into his peripheral vision, stumbling through the cratered ashes, trying to make sense of it all.

  And so Jhedothar knew, with grim certainty, that the next act of violence would be worse still. One of the Nesta Barshaum was gone; the only one in a position to fire was destroyed, and their best advantage was shattered. And now the serpent towered over them once more, unbroken and seething, reeking of coppery blood and viscous fluids, a testament to the holy blessing that let it persist beyond all reason—the true power of the Vat-Mother of Acetyn.

  “So it comes to this,” Jhedothar whispered, though his own voice sounded hollow in his ears, and he stepped forward.